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My first book, The Existential Itch, was released last week. its a frank discussion about socially constructed neurosis and how we might dissolve them. If you have any thoughts after reading it I will be glad to discuss the ideas in this thread.

you can buy it from all book sellers, it is published by Gestalt Journal Press.

Freedom is a state of mind. This state of mind cannot be brought about by thought because thought is conditioned. Thought springs from needs, desires, fears. Ego is thought and is driven by fear. It is not self, you are not your thoughts, or even your thinking mind as you may suppose. Though thought is a wonderful tool, that is all it is. Freedom does not require the cessation of thought, we only need to realise thought is not self.

All thoughts is limited by the conditioning. The idea of finding freedom is a thought and with it will come a thousand thoughts about how to proceed, deny this or that, stop this behaviour, become disciplined in this. Often meditation is undertaken in just this way, as a means to an end to achieve freedom. But the desire for freedom itself is a hindrance to finding it. All this comes from thought, and this brings only confusion or frustration.

It can’t be a doing. Freedom is in being. Thought brings strife to the internal world, not freedom. For example someone says “If I had a better job and better income I would be free” so they get a better job, and have a better income, but then find they have no time to spend in pursuits they enjoy, and they are tyrannised by the thought of losing the job or the income. They have become a slave to the ideal of more.

Freedom is available to everyone in every moment, it is not contingent on circumstances. Your reaction to circumstances is never freedom, only ever a reaction. In seeing that what we do and have, the things we build a self from, that these are not freedom, or a means to freedom; Realising this, means we begin to glimpse the opposite. We begin to understand that freedom is peace uninfluenced by thought, by circumstance, by having and doing. Yet so few people really want that kind of peace, or that kind of freedom, always we are chasing ideals and thinking about freedom, never realising the true nature of freedom is in the exact opposite.

I have been sketching again of late, as well as writing, so there have been few updates here, I hope you enjoy these few sketches. I have been playing with portraits as it has been a weakness of mine, Im trying to imbue some life into the work, previously my portraits always looked a bit lifeless, these seem to be waking up a little.

This should be no revelation to a therapist with an artistic bent, or to the many excellent art therapists out there. Painting, the act of creating an image from paint on a canvas, board or paper, wall, choose your favourite substrate, is like making contact with the self and other simultaneously. Creativity comes, for me, from my authentic self. When my authentic self is in contact with the world, good things happen, I experience joy, compassion, contact, love, as I meet the other. Painting is no exception to the rule. Except there is often a tenderness which I can express through a brush, which I rarely have opportunity to express through human contact.

I am often tender toward people, as psychotherapist, as a parent, as a husband; just being human, allowing my authentic self allows connection through tenderness; yet painting is different, there is a brush between me and the paper (usually… fingers not withstanding) the brush responds to my touch, becomes and extension of me, I express the thoughts and feelings thought the paint, the brush, I experience tenderness as I apply the paint. In these moments I can become lost in the process of creation, expression. My boundaries merge with the environment and I enter a regressive state. The parts of me that would seek attention and affirmation began the process, they drove my perfectionism. Until I assigned them new tasks and told them the criticism doesn’t help. Now instead of criticism there is encouragement to express, the critic has become a nurturing self which enables regression to state in which expression is freedom. Tenderness toward the 5 year old me who used to need the affirmation of being good at, is released into the work, and its disappointment to others is allowed and accepted with a shrug.

I am not here to meet your expectations, I never was, I am here to be me, and that is all.

The concept of possession has crept into our culture and our language has changed to accommodate it. It is a challenging form of delusion which is I think, robbing us of contentment. Everything is framed in terms of possession. I have a car, Okay, so that works if I have a car, but it becomes an issue if I try to make a self from it. Then I only have this car, and I want that car, that newer better car. It ceased to be a vehicle to get me from A to B, and became a vehicle for a delusional self, as though this better car is going to make me a better person.

What about “I have a good job.” Here we see possession. I can’t possess a job, I can do a job, it is a process, a function. In saying I have a good job I miss out the deeper truth, I experience contentment when engaged in my work. It is not a possession then, but rather an experience. There is a place for doing of course, just as there is a place for possession, but it can not replace experience and the expression of experience, it can not be used to build a self.

I could say I have a happy marriage? Well I might well experience joy in my marriage, but I cannot own or possess my marriage in the have sense. It sounds like a semantic twist I am sure and yet there is here a split between owning/having and being. The word being denotes the essential essence of a thing, a person, a being. We have stopped looking at that and started looking to people as objects. Explained by exterior decorative factors rather than experienced by their essence.

Do I have a wife? No, I am married. I am in relationship with someone and experience a connection to their essence, their being, what we might call their ontological presence. But there is and can be no possession. This is a choice to be and experience being, where there is a need for possession it is not love, it is dependency. We have grown so used to using this terminology that we have lost sight of what we are really implying, and we have lost sight of our experience of being. Which we have not even begun to explore or explain in the sentence “I have a wife”. In short we have given the deeper experience away with our need to possess.

I had a conversation with a friend about this, who was rather indignant about my accusation that we are all trying to possess others to make ourselves something; but when it came to me asking how he would describe his relationship without talking of doing or having, he was stumped. Really, couldn’t think of anything which was about being. Its not that they have a poor relationship, its that our vocabulary has become so attuned to possession or doing that we have lost the ability to conceptualise and relate experience of being.

There is an old saying, “we are human beings not human doings” and this is true, but it might be wise to extend this truth further; “we are neither human doings nor human havings, we are human beings”. In a culture which derives self from having, consumption or doing, there is little space for being, and therefore little space for us. This is how someone can see there is a housing crisis and still own two or more properties to make money (possession to build a self) whilst knowing that this restricts housing to those who need it. The people without property are objectified, reduced to animals, mere commodities to be used to build a self from.

This is my note from my mornings meditation:

There is self,

And there is no self.

Where self exists I have created it from memories and interactions with the world and other beings.

Where no self exists there is only love, nothing else.

That place of no self is hard to find because the ego doesn’t want to die, it wants to have, it wants to do, to be seen having and doing. But it must die if there is to be no self. So, fear arises and I step back into ego and self.

But the place of no self is, paradoxically, where I feel most me. It feels like coming home.

What if gender only seems to be an identity? We co create self within our extant developmental field, a field which told us that gender was both important and part of our identity. But this field also told me that people with dyslexia are thick, that being gay was evil and they deserved AIDS, that being disabled made you in-valid. If we can remove these introjected norms and see them for what they are, they quickly fall away. So, what happens if we remove gender identity from the field and see it separate from its binary narrative? If we allow this removal to take place we can clearly see, our identity has nothing to do with gender. And, gender itself ceases to require the binary polarity we have been sold. It can assume its dynamic complexity of which it was stripped; The need to assign gender ceases to be a requirement for identity. Self then is free to develop as it naturally would, without the constraints of this introjected norm. This in turn gives us the opportunity to see the self as not fixed but rather, renewed or recreated every day by our awareness and exploration of the phenomenological field we exist within. From this perspective we can understand all things are impermanent.

Perhaps self only feels like it exists because of the illusion of permanence.

It is impossible to be intimate with another, until you have become intimate with yourself.

In many ways Mindful awareness is key to this intimacy. To spend time absorbed in your own experience, to watch your thoughts come and go, to see your feelings come and watch them fall away, to experience your reactions to all these, and to be with your mental process, to see it clearly. Learning all this is impermanent, transitory, this is the key to true intimacy with the self. And from here we can meet others with mindful awareness, and intimacy between us can truly develop, without the veil of expectations. Just the ever present awareness of what is rather than what we think should be.

Shedding our own should’s, the expectations of others and for others is at the heart of meeting, one authentic self to another. After all, if you live your life by another’s should, you will live no life at all.

In a society that cares only for possession
where greed has become the mainstay
and monetarism the idol replacing spiritual connection,
the wealth of humanity is discarded.

We have lost sight of what is important in this world
eclipsed it with a false idol so beguiling,
almost all have fallen under its sway.
We exist to work,
we are told we work for a living,
yet we give our lives so cheaply,
spend our limited time so frivolously that few of us manage to live at all;
Except as slaves to monetarism and possession,
to the ideal of individuation.

And yet we fail to see
that those with mountains of wealth,
are the most impoverished among us.